HYDE-JEKYLL CASES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XXI, 21 November 1896, Page 65

HYDE-JEKYLL CASES.

AIFRBD Binet, the director of the Laboratory for Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne, in Paris, has recently published a book entitled ‘ Alterations of Personality.’ By alterations of personality M. Binet means all that variety of mental phenomena which indicate the possibility of a division or dismemberment of self. He holds it as proved that in a great many cases the normal unity of consciousness is broken up and several distinct consciousnesses are formed, each of which may have its own system of perceptions, its own memory, and even its own moral character. Dr. Jekyll, in short, may pass into Mr Hyde, do the criminal or other acts that are only possible to Mr Hyde, and revert to the Dr. Jekyll state without any consciousness or remembrance of the Hyde interregnum. Some of the cases he quotes in support of his theory are interesting. A most remarkable instance is that of one Felida, a seamstress, who from 1858 up to the present time (she is still living) has been under the care of a physician named Azam in Bordeaux. Her normal, or at least her usual, disposition when he first met her was one of melancholy and disinclination to talk, conjoined with eagerness for work. Nevertheless her actions and her answers to all questions were found to be perfectly rational. Almost every day she passed into a second state. Suddenly and without the slightest promonition save a violent pain in the temples she would fall into a profound slumber-like langour, from which she would awake in a few moments a totally different being. She was now as gay and cheery as she had formerly been morose. Her imagination was over-excited. Instead of being indifferent to everything, she had become alive to excess. In this state she remembered everything that had happened in the other similar states that had preceded

it, and also during her normal life. But when at the end of an hour or two the langour reappeared and she returned to her normal melancholy state she could not recall anything that had happened in her second, or joyous, stage. One day she attended the funeral of an acquaintance just after passing into the second stage. Returning in a cab she felt the period coming on which she calls her crisis (normal state). She dozed several seconds, without the ladies who were in the cab with her noticing it, and awoke in the other state, absolutely at a loss to know why she was in a mourning carriage with people who, according to custom, praised the qualities of a deceased person whose name she did not even know. Accustomed to such positions she waited ; by adroit questions she managed to understand the situation, and no one suspected what had happened. Once when in her abnormal condition she discovered that her husband had a mistress, and was so overcome that she sought to commit suicide. Yet in her normal mind she meets the woman with perfect equilibrium and forgetfulness of any case of quarrel. It is only in her abnormal state that the jealousy recurs. As the years went on the second state became her usual condition. That which was at first accidental and abnormal now constitutes the regular centre of her psychic life. It is rather satisfactory to chronicle that as between the two egos which alternately possess her, the more cheerful has finally reached the ascendant. A case very like Felida’s was described by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, of Philadelphia. A young girl of a naturally timid and melancholy disposition was seized at the age of twenty by a deep sleep that lasted a full day. When she awoke it became apparent that she had totally forgotten her previous existence, her parents, her country, and the house where she lived. She might be compared to an immature child. It was necessary to recommence her education. She was taught to write, and wrote from right to left, as in the Semitic languages. She had only five or six words at her command — mere reflexes of articulation which were to her devoid of meaning. The labour of re-education, conducted methodically, lasted from seven to eight weeks. Her character had experienced as great a change as her memory ; timid to excess in the first state, she became gay, unreserved, boisterous, daring even to rashness.

She strolled through the woods and the mountains, attraced by the dangers of the wild country in which she lived. Then she had a fresh attack of sleep, and returned to her first condition ; she recalled all the memories and again assumed a melancholy character, which seemed to be aggravated. No conscious memory of the second state existed. A new attack brought back the second state, with the phenomena of consciousness which accompanied it the first time. The patient passed successively a great many times from one of these states to the other. These repeated changes stretched over a period of sixteen years. At the end of that time the variations ceased. The patient was then thirty-six years of age ; she lived in a mixed state, but more closely resembling the second than the first; her character was neither sad nor boisterous, but more reasonable. She died at the age of sixty-five years. A SOMNAMBULANT THIEF. Emile X is another curious case. He is a Parisian lawyer. His father was eccentric and a drunkard ; his mother was subject to nervous spells. In his normal state he is of ordinary intelligence and morality. At certain times, however, he completely loses his memory for a day, a week, even a month. His past is obliterated. Nevertheless, as he has not lost consciousness, a new life, a new memory, a new ego, is developed in him. When a sudden awakening brings him back to the first condition he is entirely ignorant of all that had happened in his period of oblivion. On the nth of May, 1889, for example, he breakfasted in a restaurant in the Latin Quarter. Two days afterward he found himself in a square at Troyes. What had he done during those two days ? He bad not the remotest idea. All he remembered was that on coming to himself he discovered that he had lost his overcoat and his pocketbook, containing 2z6f. On another occasion he woke up to find that during his abnormal period he had been arrested and convicted of stealing before the court of Vasey. Yet the ego which inhabits his abnormal self remembers all the actions of the consecutive abnormal periods. It was only necessary, therefore, to plunge Emile into a hypnotic sleep to make him recall that he had lost his overcoat at the Hotel du Commerce, where his friends did in fact recover it.